 It's working. Hello It is everyone hear me The mic on Kind of out. There we go. I hear myself perfect. Hello everyone. Welcome to our session the title of our session today is collaboration is the key to innovation and Before I dive a little bit deeper into these topics collaboration and innovation I'd actually like to get a little bit of a feel for the people here in the room Do me a favor and raise your hand if you are here mostly because you'd love to hear some learnings best practices about collaborating across affiliates in the vikimedia movement and you'd like to be inspired and motivated by those Go ahead raise your hand. I see some hands if you're joining online also feel free to write in the chat or Just kind of do this exercise for yourself I saw some hands there perfect Do me a favor raise your hand if you're here mostly because you want to hear about some Failures and you're happy to learn from things that might actually not always go so well in collaborating Okay, I see one hand. That's very Honest of you. I appreciate that And also, please raise your hand if you are here mostly because you want to hear more about the innovation part of our Session and learn a little bit more about what it is that we're actually doing in our collaboration Okay, oh a lot of hands here perfect. Well, you're in luck anybody who raised their hand. You're in the right place We're actually going to touch all of those topics a little bit even though we won't have time for deep dives today And if you didn't raise your hand, I'm pretty sure we'll still be able to grab your attention at some point So feel free to stick around All right, now, who are we actually to talk about? Collaboration let me introduce us. I am Lucia. I am from the innovation team at Wikimedia Deutschland. So Germany and We initiated this collaboration earlier this year And I'm very happy to be joined by my wonderful collab partners over here to the left We have Angie from a chapter Wikimedia Argentina Over here, we have Anthony from a user group named Lee Tanzania Carol is joining us from the Wikimedia user group in Kenya and Ivana on the far right. How are you getting a lot of applause wonderful? popular here Yes And Ivana is joining us from the chapter Wikimedia Serbia now and I Do want to mention that we have a few colleagues that Are also part of this collaboration that couldn't make it to the stage today You can see on our slide This little world's map where we are all coming from Six different affiliates collaborating across different cultures and time zones I especially want to mention develis from the Wikimedia user group Uganda, which is also a part of this collaboration. So we're six affiliates in total coming together What are we actually doing? We got together at the start of the year. We call ourselves the innovation lab the inner lab for short and Our intention is to build a new innovation program. So a program that will Help us in the movement to strengthen our innovative capacity So we believe that there are a lot of Wonderful ideas out there in our movement for a new tools products Services projects around free knowledge, but that maybe and we could use some more spaces where we can Experiment with these ideas be a little more creative bold explorative With developing new ideas for free knowledge What we have done mostly so far is that a lot of research to better understand What are the needs in our movement to actually build such an event innovation format as well as develop some initial concepts? on what This innovation format might look like in the future Now today we want to talk a little bit about Our collaboration how this has been going and also dive a little bit into those initial ideas that we have developed as a Collaboration and with that I'm actually going to pass over to Ivana for a first insight into how this collaboration has been going so far Thank you, Lydia and thank you all for having us here to share some of the insights and some of the lesson learned I'm in this part. I'm going to talk about One of the outcomes we want to have at the end of this collaboration and hopefully not the final end So we wanted to develop the collaborate collaboration a playbook This is something that can be used for us for our future work, but also for the communities In the movement playbook is actually created and it is consisted out of the inputs of our partners And we wanted to show the answers that we want the answer that we are searching but also some of the The things that we find out as the biggest resources the biggest setbacks Maybe what things should we avoid? And all I would mention that this is not final as Lucia mentioned We already done a lot of research a lot of Brainstorming but we are thinking about adding a lot of content there Because we are expecting a lot of hopefully success successful stories But also lessons learned in the future. So here we are and sorry for the heavy text Slides, but I wanted to for you to have the glance of the playbook. So These are our partners. These are their insights When we are collaborating together, we are actually thinking bigger and broader and While working together and working towards the same goals. We are trying to create a better impact In order to do this, we need trust Trust is something that is actually creating our confidence to work to the fullest to create to put our abilities out there and to work together towards the same ideas Before we start the collaboration, we definitely need to set some clear expectations. What do we want to Work to? What do we want to achieve here? What are our roles and responsibilities? So creating this setup in the beginning is the most important part of our of our collaboration So I think that because of this diverse team of ours The greatest resources here is that diverse perspectives The diverse views insights and learnings from all of the team members So I think that we can use this because we are from the different continents different cultures with different backgrounds And to use this to achieve better impact And this is not just for our team our project This goes beyond us. Our idea is to involve Movement I involve different stakeholders from the movement. So we wanted to involve people who are working with innovation projects who are maybe not working at this point But maybe they are planning to work With innovation projects and they need some resources or tools or they want to work with us on that There are of course in every project there are challenges there are setbacks and What we face the more the most is because we are Team from different user groups and different affiliates We are of course team with different in different development stages meaning that we have different resources and I think that the main setback here was that we did have Limited resources in times of in terms of time and human resources That's why we had a lot of time on brainstorming and organizing and planning and we wanted to work more on Concrete prototypes so we are going to do that in the following months, but of course This was one of the setback that we want to go through Maybe it's not so popular to share our biggest fail But it is important of course Because of the limited resources we wanted to apply with the proposal and we did that within the movement strategy Implementation brands and because this is this was our second time We want we wanted this to go as smooth as it can but it was prolonged a little bit which Which actually affected on the kickoff the of the collaboration and also the more time for the realization and development of the prototypes and Maybe something that we are a little bit scared of is that are we going to create the right? Prototypes for the innovation projects Are we going to a really response to the right needs in the movement in different communities? so That's why we are asking you to join us to communicate with us and To go through the steps of our collaboration and be a part of it Feel free to ask questions now during this panel We will leave some time for that or maybe Approach us later this day or after that on within the online communication channels and Without further ado, this is This is something how we are going to work like in on this playbook, but right now I want to go to write to the panel discussion and start with Providing some insight from the partners Yes, thank you I'd like to kick us off on this panel discussion because Anthony I have a question for you I'd be interested to hear what are your core learnings? From this chapter as well as user group setup of this size Thank you so much Lucia. I think this cross affiliate setup is a good environment for innovation because It involves people from different diversity and geographically we're coming from different areas That helps also to have some different experience number two. I think The networking and the team working was a key factor that led us to even come to this point And I think also this is a setup that is Very good for sharing experience because we come from different areas and we have different experience within the movement and I think another thing in that This is a setup that we are looking within the foundation of the movement Which I think maybe if it's scalable if we test and do something that are productive. It's a good scalable thing. Thank you So I'll be now asking a carer Yeah What what are we are the key factors that you have learned through this close affiliate? collaboration Oh, well, I think my the biggest Most crucial for to sustain the successful cross collaboration one of them is setting clear objectives and Establishing goals to ensure that all parties are reading from the same page and another thing I think is strong communication how we pass information how we Have a common an example emailing list that we are all able to communicate and Also mucho benefits all involved parties should have tangible benefits from the collaborations and another thing I think is trust and relationship building which I think we have done so far so good with Amongst our teams from across the globe and also shared values and Common vision to provide a foundation of collaboration and Flexibility which we have tried to really achieve as a team from Different time zones across the globe and yeah, I think that is what so far we've been doing and I have a question to Ivana What has been your biggest? I know this is not the best question Your biggest frustrations so far. So, yeah, the toughest questions here So it's always it's as I said, it's not so popular to talk about some frustrations or challenges we had but what I think it's It was maybe the the thing that we involve invest a lot of time in the planning period and Maybe when you work something like this when you work through the collaboration, I think it's the most exciting part when you start doing something concrete and And this is yet to come in our Collaboration in our project. So maybe taking more time that more time in this planning part rather than Having more time for concrete Realization of the project ideas So when we feel this when we feel something is happening something is changing that where we are actually feeling the satisfaction that we are achieving something and that we are going toward our Set goal our set objectives Etc. And also Of course, it's difficult and challenging when we have the team from different continents Not just Arranging the meetings in Right time, but also Arranging the meeting in person. So this is our first meeting in person Which is really really nice and I think it will be a lot It will provide us Motivation to work after this even more and even better. Yeah. Thank you So I have a question from Angie. We didn't hear from you Okay, so What advice would you give for cross-affiliate collaboration? So why would people why would we need to do more work together? Well, I'm I will be like skipping that maybe the traditional answer to this that could be more organization or more like Knowing each other's roles. I think and a good advice could be Think of of having a good time first of all, right? Like if we are not if we don't know each other and we are not having a really great time together thinking of of new ways of Making a better movement or improving Maybe what do we the result? It's not going to be good. It's not going to be like Hard no, so I think a good advice is well, of course if you meet people at first You won't really really know them, but take your time to Know each other to Yes to know to have fun to make jokes. I don't know. Yes to have a great time So yes, basically, I'm really happy to be here. Of course also So big advice take your time to know each other in the group and really think of of doing a great job and Being happy basically What about what about you Lucia, what's your life? Thank you and I think my core advice for anybody setting up a collaboration of this Size and across different affiliates would be To Really take the time at the start not just to get to know each other, but also to Really set or become very very clear on your expectations around this collaboration So to be honest, I think this is something that we kind of we did along the way But we never took the time right at the start to really define What would make this collaboration a success? What would it look like if this collaboration? Failed and what are specifically our roles and responsibilities to make sure that we actually end up on the success part of this Scale, I think we managed well to kind of find our way But we never had this like very defined kickoff moment because I think we felt often like we were dependent on external factors that we couldn't really Influence that we're kind of making us hesitant to really kick off the collaboration But we were already working together So I think it is worthwhile to have this kind of initial Meeting preferably in person I mean we've been working together since the start of the year and some of us just met three days ago And I feel like I'm only just getting to know you So preferably in person but to really make sure that you define the scope and expectations of your collaboration Very very early on. I think that would make for an even smoother process altogether Yes Actually, I think we have time also for one question from the audience if somebody Has something that they would like to know a little bit more about on this collaboration, please feel free to I think with microphones If there's something that you would like to ask One of us panelists. Otherwise, we'll have time for this in a moment as well And Okay, I don't see any questions right now But you'll have time to to share those at the end With that, I'd say let us talk a little bit about the innovation Or innovation ideas that we have been working on Which would also mean that we're we're heading into the second set of slides Okay. Thank you so much Lucia and thank you Cicilla. All right We went through a different process on ideation And we got a lot of ideas actually but we came up on the idea selection process where we ended up of We ended up to selecting four idea napkins. So these are the ones that we're gonna be talking in this presentation Yeah, so number one we are thinking of having something like Festing over or week innovation jam. We are actually this decentralized decentralized collaboration Events are ledger are gathering to that to bring together developers and the community members in physical meetups or virtual gatherings Also, we think this to be like Events focus on idea generation Helpless support and troubleshooting and also fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange between the participants So I'll be welcoming Angie to talk about the second napkin. Welcome. Thank you Well, the next idea was to to create a web platform Where different action driving challenges could be depicted based on research and that will That contain a call to action. We thought this could be called open idea eight or challenge crafters or open ideas exchange And but basically our our our idea was that the members could add different ideas on how to talk to tackle Some tasks now some problems of the of the movement or their own contexts Thinking on our first sketch idea or or maybe something like more ready-to-skate project And very important the participation of other members on on viewing or commenting and developing further ideas Next one Right. Thank you Angie. All right. The third idea napkin that we thought We don't have the official name yet But we are thinking something like idea factory or build and test is print or even idea express or police express So it would be like a five-day workshop for developing and evaluating new idea on free knowledge through for prototyping testing Organized literally in different legional contexts or sometimes online With five with fixed days and times also It's something that we are thinking members of the movement can sign up individually or as a team which with an idea for a project or tool that they want to implement and Lastly, this is something that we are imagining that We can have some kind of coaches and that these coaches Will help the teams to clearly define the goals Validate assumptions and obtain a real feedback from users before even starting implementing that particular project Welcome Angie for the fourth idea napkin. Well, and the last idea is about invest and accelerator for innovations right a program that can provide financial aid and resources to Potential innovations that are aligned with the strategic goals of the movement So it's about a committee of some experts that can review Proposal and select different projects with with their own goals. No, there's sustainable planes Plans, sorry, no planes and Okay, well You know, the idea is that there will be also some some training and that is it. This is frequent also to to this Thank you Angie. So here No, we are leaving a QR code You can scan it. The the cure is going to be like zoomed in on a padlet on a Concept board, but you can zoom out and leave some feedback. Yeah. Yeah, definitely So you have to scan this QR code and it will be leading to you to the four idea napkins that we discussed And feel free to leave to leave some comments And what do you think about this what you are thinking on this closer? Affiliate collaboration setup. Thank you. And which one you will join also like select some exactly Leave a feedback like what what would you love this to have so you can join? Definitely Thank you. Thank you. Back to you Lucia To me Thank you Yes, thank you for those presentations Closer. It's died. Thank you We very much appreciate all of your feedback Both on the ideas that we're working on because we do want to make sure that these of course Are to the benefit of the movement to all of you and your communities And we also have and we're very good on time Which means that we have enough time also for any questions From you either on the collaboration or the innovation even I you wanted to say something Yeah, I wanted to add something about these ideas and thank you Anthony and Angie for presenting them so these ideas were created within our Collaboration, right and not all of these ideas are going to be prototype That's why we need this feedback so you can say, okay, this is exactly what I need So exactly what I need in my community or this is needed in the movement So basically when you see some of these ideas, for example You don't have if you have some a problem or some project in mind that is related to innovation You don't have to have resources. You don't have to have plan, but you can say, okay This is my problem or something. I want to tackle with and for example, if we are creating this open open AI idea to write a platform You can say, okay, this is my problem and I want to involve more people from the movement to solve it so people from the movement so Chapters or affiliates who have the resources to Deal with that problem or to find a solution they can do that and they can provide you with the solution so basically this is what I was mentioning in my presentation is that Even though We are working together. We are actually working for the needs of the movement the needs of the chapter And if you see some idea here that is really like catching your mind like, okay This is something I want to be a part of and this is something that I need Actually great. You can say, okay. This is my priority. I want to comment on that. I want to add some suggestion I want to be a part of that somehow and I want to reach out to the team members and be actually a part of that So this is why we are encouraging you to Put some stickers you can do this by You don't have to add your name if you don't want to For now or you can do it now or you can do it later the concept board will be opens for idea gathering there so please Do add your suggestions do add your Any kind of comment you have so it is there for you and it is there for us as well It will be open so feel free to do that and we're still waiting for questions if you It doesn't have to be a question or questions. Okay. Yeah, we have a question great Yeah, thank you. My name is Geoffrey from the Wikimedia community is a group of Uganda so really very much excited about this because Yeah, as a user group haven't had any innovation projects around innovation So far so we are looking to use this as a way to get our members to participate in innovation projects I think my question is Yeah, what do you think? Are the barriers for you know for user groups to participate in innovation projects that have kind of identified Because I think it would be crucial to kind of remove these barriers I think this project is that space where which can help to remove those barriers, but what are those barriers that you have identified that? you know Yeah, that prevent people from by spreading innovation projects that this project can help address and how can you address them? Thank you Thank you very much So I can I can address that and then you can continue Thank you for your question. Of course there are When when we talk about innovation we always talk about new things about new ideas new product project models Something new we want to be a part of the movement But when you are introducing something new to the movement It can be a little You know, you can have this challenge Describing the ideas why is this good or what are the benefits of this new idea? for the movement So I think it will be challenging to maybe explain some of these ideas and For the user groups if you're talking about from the perspective of the user groups, I think Mainly those are the resources So not we're not just talking about financial resources. We are also talking about the infrastructure the Time human resources, right? So Usually user groups are not Developed as chapters that they cannot provide of all of these things and that's why we are In this idea In these ideas we can network people from the chapters with resources and people from user groups who don't have the resources because I think the key is collaboration and We are now here not just promoting our Collaborations of our project but also collaboration through the movement And I think one of the one or two ideas that we are going to prototype will cover that and we'll maybe Go over those barriers. We are facing right now Thank You Cicela and thank you Joffrey for your question. I think and introduction our close affiliate setup is basically set up in the basis of recommendation number 26 innovating free knowledge and also You know that we have done a research on East African regional and them at cab and One of the questions that we asked people was whether they know about the movement strategy thing Some of them they said they never participated in any of the discussions so you can see that there is lack of awareness on movement strategy recommendations and Initiative to some of the user groups. So this causes even to not be able to know What do we exactly mean by innovating free knowledge because you know innovation is a wide topic But in the movement, what we exactly mean by innovating free knowledge. So I think sometimes lack of awareness is the problem. Yeah Carol, I'm just thinking Joffrey. Thank you for your question Challenges are there and I think How to tackle them and is first of all starting you have to start and Come up with clear objectives and I think With that these other challenges of finance challenges time and all that will just come later and flow and I would say what I have learned so far is sacrifice time across the globe and not being I think scared of Saying I don't know I need to understand I need to learn and Yeah, that is I think one of the things you can use to face the challenge and also to Not to be afraid to go to the bigger affiliates like we are very small from Uganda Kenya Tanzania I think we should not be scared to approach The mentors there are so many mentors and I think it's something that can be done to To to work together and do the collaborations Thank you so much Carol. So another addition point to that We have user groups they that that understands about the movement strategy, but always the problem is Getting started So this cross affiliate movement Is trying to be an inspirational thing? Like we get started even though sometimes you don't understand like that We don't have the answers to everything but at least let's get started with something So maybe we can be a scalable thing in the future. Thank you Back to you Cicela Ivana Welcome Lucia Do we have more question? Oh, I thought you want to add something. Okay. We have question yet. Thank you That's a great presentation and The issue of collaboration that is the way to go Considering the world we are in today My concern is that for this collaboration to thrive Do you have like a strategic plan or like how long with this take? You have just mentioned that, you know, there are objectives and what you're supposed to achieve So do you have like a strategic plan? So that we can see how long will this Collaboration take Thank you. I can take this one. Thank you for the question so At Wikimedia Deutschland, we're the ones that kind of initiated this collaboration and We've very much set it up in phases So ultimately we have defined different phases of research Ideation so generating ideas that we want to work with Prototyping these ideas testing them in different regions and then actually implementing Hopefully some of these ideas in the long run and So we have clear idea of where do we want to go, but we're the collaboration itself or very much looking at in phases Because we know it can evolve and change a big part of how we work together is Being open-minded and flexible in terms of who has how many resources To allocate to this collaboration how much resources can we commit at what time throughout the collaboration? So for now, we've set a timeframe of I think it's about eight months is what we Roughly defined for these first phases of the collaboration and to then go into a kind of Feedback evaluation loop of where we then see where we at now How has the collaboration been working? How does it maybe need to be tweaked and before then heading into kind of the next phase? Ultimately, if we look at what we're trying to achieve and this would definitely be something that would require more than eight months But we've kind of just set clear goals in terms of where do we want to be at the end of these eight months and Continuously go into feedback loops to see are we on track? I can tell you that we're not on track To be very honest, we definitely had some setbacks and a lot of Sorry parts of this collaboration have been taking up a lot more time than we initially thought so The eight months is pretty It's a tight schedule for us for sure But I think we have enough flexibility to see kind of where will it take us beyond that also Maybe I don't know Maybe others want to collaborate with us in the future as well. So I think there's always this openness to see How can we realign some of our? Expectations somebody want to add anything? I Think you covered it well Thank you Let's go to the mic, please. Yeah Thank you so much for Beautiful ideas that you did display there. They're really great. So I wanted to question about the idea So like how did you come up with these ideas? Did you do a needs assessment? Did you like involve involve the communities so that you came with these ideas? Oh, I just want to learn more about how it came about them. Thank you All right, thank you so much for your question, Eben This close affiliate Collaboration is basically being done for the East Africa and F hub And as I said before we need a proper research on what are the needs that East Africa and Wikimedians Do anticipate to be solved by a hub setup? so we collaborate with other affiliates here and some of Some of them are leaders in their user groups. They do understand their community is better. They know their challenges They know their problems. That's why we came together and collect Through the ideation process based on the problems challenges of communities are facing That's where we came with we had a pool of ideas And then it came up to select like four ideas that we think are more doable in our community I'd love to add to that so the Based on all the research that we've done also in East Africa as well as in other parts of the globe within our Movement what we did and this is This is important for me to shout out to everybody who kind of has been involved in this in this process as we actually Continuously got feedback from a lot of other people throughout the movement stakeholders people that we know are working on the topic of innovation Or are interested in doing so people who are very Much doing their own research also on what are kind of the needs In our movement and we continuously got their feedback in And stayed in in conversation And we also organized several ideation workshops with these people from the movement from very very different regions I think we talked to at least 70 people across. I don't know what it was 46 regions or something to Develop a lot of ideas that work for a lot of different contexts and regions And then applied some criteria to find out. Okay, what are the ideas that make sense for us to continue working on at this time There's still beyond the ideas that we shared today There's this huge backlog of a lot of other ideas that were presented as well I think in total we had about 300 ideas that were shared And that we also all want to make accessible to everybody Because it might well be that we can't implement all of these 300 ideas In the next few years, but maybe somebody else in the movement Does feel like there's an idea and that that they want to work on So this is something that's very important to us to make all this very very accessible and transparent in terms of what Can we work on and what maybe Is is up for grabs for others at this point Yeah, I can just add just a small comment here. Um, so Um We had those stakeholders from the movement involved, but also Within this workshop. We tried to think about the needs from our parts of the world Let's say so our part of the community. So what would be really useful really tangible? after we Finished the project And it can be sustainable in the future. So it's not like we're stopping there. That's it We're trying to create some sustainable solutions for the needs of the community And this is why the team is important because you can also see different angles of different communities Yeah, and also I think what's going to be very interesting is When we go into prototyping and testing some of these ideas is to have a bit of a check and balance as to Whether our assumption is true that these ideas might actually work for several different regions Or if they would need to be tweaked to function in different communities as well I think that's going to be a very uh steep learning curve when we actually go into implementation Okay, maybe we have more Time for one more question. We are at the end of the panel, but maybe there is More questions for the audience or not. Hurry we have a minute and a half I'll take it. I'll take up this lot. So I think for me, what do you see like, you know, uh If you, you know, whatever one, you know, what is happening with this project like, you know, uh, if we are to Emania 2024 Just one thing that you envision happening that you share with us that because of this innovation Project this happened. Like what do you what's your vision? Like what do you want to see in one year from now? Thank you Yeah, I'll just quickly answer because it's very tough question But I would really love to see some developed tools or projects that are Are accepted from the community and that is really Are used in the community. So for a year from now So we will have this cool project or projects That that some of the affiliates accepted it through used it that maybe It's led to Maybe gathering more people to collaborate such as this platform that I mentioned but like more of the Networking and real real joint projects of the between the chapters and affiliates I think I think our team is up so We say thank you for finding time to come and listen to us And we hope to talk to you in future. You're welcome to talk to us and Partnerships work. Thank you so much Thank you Thank you so much everyone. It's now lunchtime and we'll see you back here at 2 15